Fermentation Bucket Liners

Fermentation Bucket Liners

Difficulty:

Time Required:

As long as it takes to empty the trash

Background:

So you know how much of a pain it is to clean and sanitize your carboy/bucket/conical after fermentation is complete? All that yeast residue, hop matter, etc? Well this is my method that has served me quite well the last 2 years and makes cleaning a piece of (yeast) cake.

The bags are also great to store your milled grain the night before brewday. Then re-use the bags for trash or spent grain.

When I say “bucket” in these instructions, I also mean carboy, conical, trash can, etc.

Required:

FDA Approved bag liner. See below for discussion….

Options:

Option 1 (new as of March 26, 2015)

An astute reader (see post comments) found another source on Amazon for another equivalent bag liner. I’ll pick up a case and update. They are much thinner (0.39 mil versus the 1.5 mil thick bags that I’ve been using). They are also about half the price. As of March 26, 2015, they were $26 for 250 ($0.10 / bag).

The link above is for the clear 40 gallon size, but they also have different capacities.

I can even shake the fermenting bucket to oxygenate and it has never leaked

FDA Compliant

If you go to their website and click on “Additional Info”, it will list “FDA Compliant”

Made from Linear Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE)

Most fermentation buckets are made from High Density Polyethylene (HDPE)

I called them before ordering and they couldn’t tell me what “FDA Compliant” meant

Pre-Sanitized or sterilized?

I don’t know

I have always just pulled a new bag out and dropped it right in

Never had any off flavors

Never had any infections

As of 11/14/13 they are $51 for 250 bags

$0.20 / bag

Durable

Never had a bag leak

fully supported by bucket anyway

You can essentially make any container into a fermenter!

Mr. Obvious Directions:

Pull new bag out, put into fermenter, pour in wort

Then do everything you would normally do

When done, rack beer as you normally would

pull bag out, tie shut, put in trash

easy peasy!

Directions with bonus material:

Preparation

Get the bag and bucket ready

Bag Construction

Bags are sturdy on the bottom

Easy tiger!

If you shake to oxygenate your wort, or you will be opening the lid before starting the fermentation, go directly to the next step. With the bag all the way to the bottom of the bucket, the rest of the bag COULD be pulled down all the way like this, but DON’T. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Leave a lot of the bag in the bucket

I went from shaking to oxygenate the wort, to an aquarium pump, back to shaking. Not great for my back, but this is my method for now. My point is, when you put the lid on, it does stretch the bag material and sometimes could put a hole in the bag and if you need to open the lid and reseal before starting fermentation, you may not get a good seal the next time. By leaving more bag in the bucket, after you open the lid, you can pull more fresh bag out and have a brand new seal.

Ready for the wort

My burner is at the perfect height where I just tip my kettle and pour it into the fermenter. By the time I need to lift it to pour the remaining wort, it only has about a gallon left.

Now the wort is in the bucket with the liner

If you are going to put the lid on to shake it or you need to put it in your keezer to get some extra temperature drop before pitching your yeast, go ahead and do so now.

Cut me some slack, Jack!

When you are ready to pitch your yeast and close the lid for the final time, grab the bag and pull up on it. Not enough to pull it out of the bucket, but just enough to pull the slack out of it and hopefully get rid of any potential air pockets between the bag and the walls of the bucket.

Keeping things neat and tidy

If you want, you can roll the excess bag up and then tie it into a knot.

Fermentation…..waiting……

When you are ready to rack to secondary or the keg or whatever, pop the lid and smell the awesomeness you just created.

Only the lid is messy

The lid has crud on it like usual or from the vigorous shaking you did prior to pitching the yeast.

Holes / Stretching I mentioned

See the stretching and potential holes in the bag? You only want these from the lid seal outward.

This is what’s left

Your usual yeast cake. Do notice how some sediment settles in the wrinkles of the bag. You really can’t prevent this, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have cleared beer. I’ve had some brilliantly clear beers. In my opinion, it’s all about giving it enough time to settle.

Pull the bag out

Here’s your yeast ready for washing, re-pitching, whatever

Check out that perfectly clean bucket!

And the rim is clean too

Not often, but occasionally due to the stretching of the bag or holes, I do get some beer on the lip only. Still, way easier to clean the lip than the entire bucket!

Congratulations! You just saved yourself a few minutes (if not more) of cleaning and sanitizing, plus the drying time.

February 7, 2014 Update

Ok, so even though I’ve been using the bags for over a year now, and my judgement was good enough for me, I thought I would get a second opinion.

Fortunately, it just so happened that on the Basic Brewing Radio podcast, James had recently done a couple episodes on Homebrew Toxicology.

I emailed James to get in touch with “Paul the Toxicologist” to get his opinion. Do not take this as a full endorsement from Paul or James, but just some cool homebrewers helping another homebrewer out.

Here is Paul’s response:

So on to your question about FDA compliant vs. Food Grade. There could be a difference, but it may just be semantics as well. Think “not all parallelograms are squares, but all squares are parallelograms”. FDA has a lot of regulations, so by saying it is FDA compliant does not mean it is food grade. But I would take it that if someone were to call a product food-grade, what they would mean is FDA compliant to the specific FDA regulations that deal with food contact materials.

That link also says FDA compliant but is more specific in that is says “FDA approved for food storage”. Again, this is not to say that the bags you are using aren’t the same. What would help is if Uline were to provide the specific regulation that is making them FDA compliant – this would tell you whether they are compliant to the food contact regulation. The reference you would be looking for is 21 CFR 177.XXXX, where the XXXX is another set of numbers that specifies the approval for that specific polyethylene.

A reference to the CFR citation will also help to figure out if your specific use (storing alcoholic beverages) is an approved use of the material. I took at look at one of the entries for polyethylene in 21 CFR 177.1630 (you can find it at the FDA search site as well http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm). In this entry you will see that (according to part 21 CFR 177.1630 (f)(2)) that “The plastics are used for packaging, transporting, or holding food, excluding alcoholic beverages, at temperatures not to exceed 250 deg.”

So you can see that FDA compliant is a complicated statement, in that it isn’t a material that is approved for use, but instead it is a material for a specific use that is approved for use. This is based on the fact that the companies need to conduct migration testing to ensure that nothing hazardous migrates out of the plastic and into food under specific conditions. To be compliant with the FDA regulation, they only need to test situations that are water-based, and do not need to look at contact with alcohol (which is a different solvent and could leach out different compounds).

I just sent a note out to Uline that I used some of my regulatory-speak, I’ll let you know if I hear anything back from them.

So the bottom line is that if I had to guess, I would think that the Uline liners you have found (and likely all other similar liners you could find) are actually compliant with the FDA regulation for food contact. However, I would also suspect that they will indicate that they are not intended to be used in contact with alcoholic beverages, such as your intended use. So from a regulatory compliance standpoint, I have a feeling that you are not using those liners for an approved use.

That being said… I would also say that your risk of having things migrate into beer at a relevant concentration is pretty small. When I talked to the polymer toxicologist that I know, his advice was that if you are using a food-grade polyethylene that the starting materials that are used in their manufacture are almost all gone in the final product, leaving only long polymers that are not toxic. There could be some of these starting materials left over in trace amounts (monomers, catalysts, etc.), but anything that would migrate out of that plastic would be coming out under “approved” use. When you are using these bags under “non-approved” use, you are likely only going to be leaching out the same materials that would come out under the approved use, and therefore unlikely to be leaching out anything else with the alcohol that would increase the hazard of those liners.

So if you wanted a toxicological opinion, since you are using a food grade material (and a known material) it is a low risk from using those bags. If you listen to the podcasts, this is a similar explanation that I gave for the picnic cooler mash tun or jerry can no-chill wort chilling, they are all “non-approved” uses for food grade materials but are low risk.

Response from Uline

Dear Paul,

Thank you for contacting Uline Product Questions.

In response to your question about the S-13572, 24 X 33″ 12-16 Gallon 1.5 Mil Clear Trash Liners, these bags are approved for the bagging or packaging of containers of alcoholic beverages. They are also approved for containing or packaging of non-contained beverages. Unfortunately, there is no 21 CFR reference available and no migration testing has been done on this item.

Update again:

In the 3rd installment of Homebrew Toxicology, they actually discuss my conversations with them. It’s the first topic they cover and it starts at about 5:30 into the podcast.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/basicbrewing/bbr02-27-14toxicology3.mp3

Me again:

The fact that they are approved for containing “non-contained beverages” is good enough for me. I can certainly understand the legal ramifications of the word “approved”. As a company, I am assuming that they can only list a product as approved, if the actual test has been carried out to a certain standard. The FDA standard Paul referenced does however have the caveat “excluding alcoholic beverages”.

If you listen to the Basic Brewing Radio podcasts however, you will quickly understand that when it comes to food contact, it doesn’t seem to matter what is in contact with the plastic and at normal temperatures, if something is going to leach from the plastic into your food/liquid, it is going to happen anyway. So by that logic, I work out that if it is safe for generic beverages, it is safe for alcoholic beverages.

I just wanted to say a special thanks to James Spencer of Basic Brewing Radio and Paul “the toxicologist”. I appreciate the straightforward nature of the Basic Brewing podcasts and Paul for just being a cool guy willing to help other homebrewers and to dispel some of the myths and misconceptions withing the brewing community.

For what it’s worth, Paul also found these bags. Different size, but you can work out which size you want:

23 thoughts on “Fermentation Bucket Liners”

I’d be a little nervous about brewing in trash can liners. Even though they are LDPE, which is used in food packaging, the Uline trash liners aren’t specifically certified as food grade. If they aren’t certified as food grade they are permitted to have dangerous chemical residue from their manufacture left on them. In the future I’d seek out LDPE bags that are certified food grade.

I just bought a box of these! I am very excited to try these out on my 7.9 gallon buckets. I am even wondering if you could use these in corny kegs too? That would be even more awesome! Never clean up again. Just sanitize and use.

You will love the convenience. I had thought about the corny kegs as well, but the difficulty is the liquid and gas ports. You’d need to move them to the lid. And I’m not sure how well the bag would seal with the o-ring. See my notes on the EV Container Plastic Kegs in my NHC Homebrew Expo post.

Can you post a link to the ev container plastic kegs? I am absolutely LOVING the liners for my 7.9 gallon Austin Homebrew bucket fermenters. The are incredibly easy to use. The best thing about them in my opinion is being able to use any fermenter to do sour ales. No more making sure only one bucket is allowed to do sours and nothing else. I have just placed them in a fermenter and placed my wort on top of them with no starsan sanitation. That is my one worry though. Do you ever sanitize these liners? According to the podcast it sounded as if it is not necessary but I still worry a little about not doing so. I have had great luck with no spoiled batches thus far so I will continue to not sanitize them. I have done 5 gallon batches with this method and everything is wonderful!

Jake,
Thanks for the update! I’m glad you are doing well with the liners. I do not sanitize them and have never had any infections or off-flavors caused by sanitation. Not having to allocate a set of fermenters just for your sours is definitely another advantage.
Here is the link to the plastic kegs:http://www.evcontainer.com/
And I discuss them a little on my post here:

Saw this talked about I think in BYO and then found your site. The ULINE bags are pretty pricy for me to get shipped to me, they’re over $75 for a box.

I did a bunch of searching on Amazon and finally found a bag that looks to be suitable. It’s thinner then these heavier U-Line bags, but it’s listed as meeting the FDA requirements for food contact both on Amazon’s own listing and on the manufacturer’s site:

They’re a great deal for Prime members since they ship free and are only $25 for 250, even if I have to double bag them I’m getting 125 batches for just $25. 20 cents a batch (only 10 cents if I don’t end up needing double bags.).

Plus for me I do some fermentation in 15 gallon blue HDPE barrels, so these are also plenty big for that container.

Kevin,
Thanks for the find. I’ll update my post to include those. I’m still a ways off from finishing my case, but I’ll certainly look at those next time I order. I’m also looking at larger fermenter sizes, since I’m about to make the move to 10 gallon batches.
Eric

As much as I love the Uline bags, I am trying not to doubt them as much as I want to at times. My last 4 batches have been leakers into the bucket after fermentation. I am very careful and follow the directions as you state/ leave slack when re-entering. Not sure why it’s happening. I started off just fine with them. I am still continuing to use them though. Now I just sanitize my bucket just as a fail safe but of course that keeps the bucket wet when inserting the bag. This in turn makes the bag stick to the bucket which is probably creating air pockets.

Jake,
Sorry to hear you have had some leaking. When I pull up the slack, I then let it settle again. I can’t say what I think is happening. Did you get the same thickness bags? I can’t even count how many batches I’m up to using this technique, but it’s got to be near 50 with not a single leak.

Yes, I bought the same 1.5 mil bags from them that was in your link. It has to be from my aerating method. I typically tuck the slack of the bag inside before closing the lid and shaking. It could be from aggressive shaking?

Before I went back to shaking I was using a drill bit fitting paint stirring type of device from time to time that I purchased at the brew shop. I was always extremely careful not to touch the bag with it but I guess it could have came in contact. Unfortunately that stir stick won’t solve the problem for the other leaking bags that I didn’t use it on. Could have just been a set of bad ones since they were all in a row?

Jake,
Did you put the entire bag inside the fermenter when shaking? If so, then I would guess that wort is leaking around the outside of the bag and that is what you are finding post-fermentation. If not, I’m not really sure what to say. Feel free to email me if you still don’t have success with this method.

Sorry I keep forgetting to check back here for a response. It’s not emailing me for whatever reason. No I do not put the entire bag inside the closed bucket when shaking. I just put a large portion of slack in it with the top of the bag hanging outside of the lid. Just did 3 different batches. We will see what happens with these. They were all shaken and not used with the drill attachment.

Next time you get a leaker, hold onto the bag and inspect it to see where the leak is. That will give you a big clue as to what’s happening. If you don’t see it, blow the bag up with air and the leak might become more evident. If it’s at the base of the bag, where it’s been puckered and sealed, you might have a defective batch of bags.

I think I am ready to point blame towards the drill attachment I used to aerate with. These last bags have not leaked one bit and I only did shale method with them. Although I was incredibly careful using that attachment, it must have punctured the bags. I really love these things! Saves so much time. Thanks again! Cheers to you

So, I ran into issues with this after using it for a year, essentially I started to get infected batches. I’ve tracked it down to most likely last fall when some cider with wild yeasts in it was fermented in buckets using this method and then the lids (though cleaned and sanitized) now seem to somehow harbor this yeast, infecting the batches since then.

So, I’ve come up with a way to use these to create a 100% disposable fermentor in a bucket.

I have not tried them in carboys, but in a recent Experimental Brewing podcast, they interviewed a guy that also uses food grade bags for his carboys and he does not have a problem. The link for the exact show is here:

Steve,
I would assume mostly. I’ve been using many of the same buckets with the bags and most have no residual odors. The only ones that may have residual smells would be from my heavily spiced Christmas beer or my Belgian style beers.